I said it can be done with enough input data. I never said I could do it for a random person on the internet.
And for the predictions I made here, I have the input data. The likely economic differences between a car and an SDC. All I need to know to predict the behaviour of people in this regard is "hungry people look for food".
>Yeah, well, I guess she can run a family on that, ha? Not only CAN she do so, she does, and I subsidized her children's school fees so they can be in a better school. That doesn't count as part of her income either (meaning I don't get to claim it as a business expense because I don't write it on her payslip). That's just me being a decent human being,
>How many hours a day does she do for you, 4.. a week? I pay her a monthly salary, not an hourly one. I don't care if she works 1 hour a month - as long as things are clean, her job is done, smart bosses let people go home when they've done their job for the day. Smart bosses don't punish people for being more efficient workers - they reward them by not making them sit and try to look busy till 5.
>She takes a vacation, you pay her? Yes, I give her a long vacation every year, and she gets full pay for the month when she does.
>She gets pregnant, you are going to hire her back after a year of somebody else working for you? I did exactly that. When she got pregnant, I got a temp in - through an agency so she will have other work after - and when she came back after 3 months, her job was waiting for her. I could have faced jailtime had it not been because it's a crime to fire somebody over getting pregnant, it's sexist in the extreme. But it was never an issue since I would never do that anyway.
If the law requiring you to do what any decent human being would have done ANYWAY puts you out of business - that's a GOOD thing, it opens up the market for a businessman who is actually deserving of the name "human being".
Literally according to the dictionary can mean two things - the meaning you grammar nazi's always complain isn't valid, is one of the meanings. But in this case, I was actually using the first meaning, it really is the easiest thing in the world to predict. It takes rather more effort when tossing a ball into the air to predict where it will land. In both cases it's easy enough that those who learn how can do it without even being aware that they are doing it, completely subconsciously, but the math that's being subconsciously done for the ball is far more complicated.
You don't need probability to predict human behaviour. Basic biology will suffice.
>Until you hired a person and paid them a salary allowing them to actually fucking live, go fuck yourself, you moralizing asswipe! I do - and I pay fair wages. My cleaning lady earns roughly 6 times the minimum wage. I practise what I preach.
By your own admission, you think people who are not in a strong negotiating position don't deserve to be able to take a little break at least once a year, if they get pregnant they don't deserve to know they will have a job to come back to in order to feed their child.
Hell even the bloody people who CONCEIVED of the ideas you push knew that was both idiotic and brutal. That's why Hayek for example was a strong advocate of a universal basic income because, to quote him: unless there is a floor price on the labour market, the labour market can NEVER be a free market.
Without a floor price, without some things being non-negotiable - all labour markets can ONLY turn into slavemarkets - it is the only logical outcome. By your own admission - you actively avoid treating people fairly, you don't BUY their labour at a fair price - hell you don't even pay the legal minimum wage which is in most countries about half a fair wage for a full third of somebody's adult LIFE - and I'm prepared to bet you don't limit yourself to that third either. No way do you adamantly insist your workers keep an 8 hour day and if you really need them to work more pay them proper overtime rates commensurate with the fact that they are sacrificing things that matter infinitely more than your bottom line - like seeing their familes. No you steal their lives by exploiting their desperation and lack of options. People like you are the reason the soviet union ever existed. The blood of all of Stalin's victims are on YOUR hands - without people like you, communist revolutions would never have happened. Those who sell labour - are literally selling you the most precious thing they, or you, can ever have. Their time alive. The one thing nobody can ever get back once it's lost. You can make back lost money. You can heal broken bones. You can even heal a broken heart... but time lost, is lost forever, and we really don't get very much of it - certainly not enough to sell the little we have cheaply. And nobody would, unless the risk of selling high was having less time. Nobody would work for an unfair wage unless the alternative was starving. That's not free labour. That's slavery. Nobody goes on a revolution against people who are not mistreating them.
People like you CAUSED all that bloodshed, created the only kind of conditions where people would read Marx's reasoning and then IGNORE his please to use only democratic means to change things - and choose bloody revolution instead, installing dictators as revolutions usually do.
Worker's rights exist, to keep people like you from creating the kind of conditions that inevitably boil over into revolutions like that. They exist to keep you in your selfish, arrogant, rentseeking, expoitation from causing enough misery that people become ready to sacrifice their lives - if they can just kill you. Because THAT is what your reasoning ALWAYS ends up leading to. Sooner or later. When you coerce people into horrible working conditions which they have no choice but to reject unless they want to starve too much... sooner or later, they turn on you and they tend to go overboard. Napoleon said "Religion is the only reason the poor don't kill the rich". What happened in the Russian revolution - that's what happens when the poor are finally pushed far enough to lose their religion, or just plain start ignoring it.
Now as it happens, and to get back on topic, the specific labour laws being discussed are ones which - when absent, harm women far more than men. No man has ever been fired because he happened to get pregnant and his boss refused to give him maternity leave - men don't get pregnant. Paid family leave when missing harms men, but it harms women far more because our society still expects them to be primary caregivers. Sweatshop labour and paying less than what's needed to escape poverty punishes not only the workers - but their children. Study after study shows how poverty in childhood causes lifelong health issues and genetic changes which harms many generations - yet you claim
You're right about that, and I don't dissagree. But to claim a law doesn't exist because it should never have been passed is still disingenuous. You can't fix problems if you don't acknowledge them first.
That's not what is meant by these leave things. Of course it means gettiing paid less, and unused leave is paid back to you when you resign, this is not even remotely related to where the issue is. The issue is about having it written into law that no employer can DENY this leave. You should not have to face the risk of being fired for getting pregnant. And making it legally guaranteed that EVERY worker in the country gets at least 14 days of paid leave a year which companies are not allowed to withhold (and can be fined if an excessive amount is not taken to prevent coercion) increases the productivity of the entire workforce by several times more than what is lost to the holidays (because non-burned out people work harder).
This has been a standard labour law in every free nation except yours for nearly a century, if it was going to cause a collapse it would have done so by now. It hasn't, it made all those countries a lot RICHER than they would otherwise have been - because fuckall any libertarian or Austrian economist says has ever been remotely connected to reality. And there is no theft involved, the branding of maintaining society as "theft" is a lie only your fellow idiots believe, smart people can figure out that all the advantages of living in civilized society cost money, and that paying your fair share is the only way you have any right to those advantages and that the wealthier you are the greater the degree to which you take advantage of them, thus the greater the burden of upkeep on you becomes.
We know that it is simply a FACT that NEVER in all of history has a moderate increase in minimum wage led to joblosses - the general effect on employment is always nett-zero with rare occasions where it causes a slight INCREASE. Empirical facts is what you people lack and what makes all your ideas nothing but cultistic pseudoscience.
There is literally nothing in the world more easily predicted. Indeed, there are a huge number of careers (most of them in fact) that depend entirely on the fact that the fact that this is so easy to predict. At the most obvious level everybody from stage magicians to conmen make their living this way, but so do all marketers, salesmen and basically every business in the world. The only difference is one of skill, predicting it in aggregate is much easier - so everybody does that (and most people do it well enough to survive), predicting a particular individual is harder but equally possible, so only a select few people can manage that. That's why there are fewer conmen and stage magicians than there are advertising agents. But they all do the same job - accurately predict people's responses to a given set of circumstances and incentives and then exploit that predictability. We all believe that our own behavior cannot possibly be predictable, it's an illusion. In fact, even your claim that it is "stupid" to think this is a predictable thing was entirely predictable - when I wrote it I knew what your reply would be, and started preparing this response.
People respond to incentives. If you create incentives that reward cheating, almost everybody cheats. When a new technology offers massive cost advantages over the existing, almost everybody switches. You don't need to predict the few outliers to succeed because there is never enough of them to be statistically significant - and even they are entirely predictable if you have personal data on them - that's the level where the conmen operate, they study the individual, learn all about you (from very little data) and suddenly people are impressed by the psychic's apparent ability to know the unknowable. Look up "cold reading" and "leading questions" - learn how easy it is to find out all the key indicators that will predict EXACTLY what incentives would sway your behavior, exactly what wording will fool you and win your trust, exactly what your biasses are and how to exploit them.
If this was hard, or impossible, conmen would not exist at all. Contrary to popular opinion, conmen rarely pray on the stupid - the stupid doesn't have money. Conmen PREFER smart people because smart people have more to take and they are no harder to con - you just have to find the right levers, in many ways they are actually the EASIEST to con - because they assume they are too smart to BE conned.
Every other country on earth has figured out you are wrong about every one of these things, and they are all getting the benefits.
Sorry pal but your ideology is never going to be perceived as anything but an assault on half the population's ability to pursue happiness and equal opportunity and for the oddest reason, this is going to shock you, you'll never have guessed why: because that's exactly what it ends up being. It doesn't MATTER if that's the INTENTION, the RESULT matters.
Like taking over a wildlife reserve warden's station ? Scary, but mitigated by the fact that although they may remember to bring guns they apparently aren't smart enough to pack things like food and blankets...
Yes. The American system is such that a congress full of crazy wingnuts can make any president ineffectual. Obama's problem was trying to be reasonable in a room filled with 400 toddlers throwing tantrums.
Somebody should point out that on every metric, from structure to final product the truth is that heavy metal is the most like classical music today. It would not be a stretch to call the best metal bands of today (notably the Slavic and German powermetal movements) the contemporary form of symphonic music, with heavy inspiration (and usage) of opera and operatic concepts (indeed, most European metal singers have classical opera training).
My all time favourite symphonic pieces is the 1812 overture and the 9th, and if you can't their echoes in the works of Powerwolf then you don't know how to listen for it.
>Although I haven't heard their arguments, what evidence the right put up in defense, statistics, studies etc.
They can't provide evidence because all the statistics are against them. Economics show that mass immigration has always, in all countries, created more jobs than the immigrants took and there is solid mathematical reasons why this is the only possible outcome so the "taking our jobs" claim has to be false because it's about as impossible as claiming you just threw a baseball into orbit. Of course economics is buffeted by many forces, and it's possible the US would be an exception at this time - but that is a seriously extraordinary claim, which requires seriously extraordinary evidence (like claiming that a variety of human may have evolved with the upper arm strength to throw a baseball into orbit without it catching fire on the way). Hell they constantly complain about a "growing number of immigrants" and even that claim is factually false since immigration rates with Mexico has been a nett negative for many years. More people are leaving the US to go TO Mexico than the other way around (mostly people who are of Mexican descent but that doesn't change the maths). It's actually quite ironic, if Trump does build his wall, it would actually increase the number of Mexicans in America next year - because it would limit the emigration to those who have the papers to leave the country legally (hint: none of those who came in illegally have them).
> They've been all over the North Carolina "bathroom bill" and how awful and discriminatory it is despite it applying to everyone equally.
A law or rule which has the practical effect of significantly affecting one group more than others is discriminatory regardless of whether that group is named in the law or group. This is not even just an American thing, it's the legal standard all over the world. Here in South Africa it is even written into the constitution. So for example if you live in a city with a particularly strong racial correlation to economic class, and your restaurant goes and puts up a dress code which would require clothes that almost no non-white person could afford, that would be considered de facto racial discrimination and be illegal. Not having the law says that would mean all discrimination would have continued utterly unabated - people would simply find proxies for race that work equally well.
The bathroom bill is probably the single most egregiously discriminatory law passed since the civil rights act. North Carolina is on the wrong side of history (somehow the hard reds always seem to find themselves there) and I would just say that our grandchildren will look at this law the way we look at Jim Crow - and I for one would prefer my grandchildren to say "At least my granddad was on the side that was against these terrible laws". My own grandfather was a member of a miltant Nazi-propaganda group at that time, in that place, this was seen as nobel - but that doesn't make it any less despicable. Do you think Sam Rockwel's grandchildren are going around bragging that their grandpappy founded the American NAZI party ?
But sure, go support our generation's Jim Crow. Start a lynch mob while your at it, you won't be hated any less by future generations for NOT starting a lynch mob, they will probably assume you were in one regardless.
Well, outside the US and Canada these FM receivers work. All of my phones have had working FM receivers... and I have never used any of them, for all the radio annoyances you mention. The closest would be on the day the phone is received, checking out the features - I may put the FM on for a few seconds to hear it working, then I switch it off and it's never turned on again.
My current phone has 64Gb of storage space, that holds more than enough music on the phone itself to get through my commute and not hear the same song more than once every 2 weeks or so. No need for either data plan or the annoyances of FM radio.
He has signed fewer executive orders than any other president in history. He has been able to pass exactly ONE of the laws he campaigned on - i.e. the laws voters elected him to get passed.
> And I, for one, am grateful for an "obstructionist" Congress in his case. I did say we would probably not agree. I assume you are at least even handed and hate republican presidents more because pretty much everything he DID do they did first and bigger. I see a lot of people here complaining about Obama "not enforcing immigration law", but nobody seems to blame Reagan for that, even though the actions for which Obama was blamed were instituted by Reagan and the policy has simply been continued by every president since then (including both Bush presidencies). Obama did nothing new there, it's been the official policy since Reagan, Obama merely thought that a republican had been right about something - apparently republicans hate it when you think they did something right.
>Are you stating that it is illegal to start a party which supports nationalizing all companies and major private assets without compensating the current owners, or that it is illegal to start a party advocating seizing all governments from the Federal to the local school authority boards by force to do the same?
I am saying there is a law that says you cannot start or be a member of a communist party. You gave two examples of what a Bolshevist party would do, apparently you don't know that there are hundreds of varieties of communism and literally EVERY other variety rejects that approach and most of them would make the government far smaller than even the wettest republican dream (quite a lot of them are forms of anarchism). Now whether the law in question defines communism, whether it defines it as Bolshevism or whether it blanket-covers all of them I do not know, nor do I care much.
>Obviously, it is illegal to start a "Communist Party of the United States of America" for the same reason that it is illegal to start a "Walt Disney Corporation" -- violation of trademarks held by the incumbents -- but I assume THAT is not your problem.
>Obviously, it is illegal to start a "Communist Party of the United States of America" for the same reason that it is illegal to start a "Walt Disney Corporation" -- violation of trademarks held by the incumbents -- but I assume THAT is not your problem. Did I say I have a problem ? I have no problem. I don't even live in America so I really don't care what laws you make for yourself. I just think you should know what laws you live under and not go bragging about your superiorty to the world when there are laws on the books which contradict your claims. The communist control act was passed, it was signed into law by the president, it has never been repealed and it has never been federally overturned. It is, still, the law of the land in the USA.
>PS: If "I don't read or reply to ACs. Ever." Because the sig-length limit left me unable to add "when they reply to me" - which is true. I never know about AC replies to me because I have a mailfilter that deletes them so I never get the notifications because I do not care to read them.
>It's good that you support ending this atrocity, Oh, you do have sane thoughts sometimes.
>but I'm confused that you've mentioned it when describing 'the war on women'. What men experience in prison - is the entire WORLD if your'e a woman.
>Asking a rape victim (or claimed rape victim) challenging questions is not victim blaming "Were you drinking ?" "What were you wearing ?" And similar are not challenging questions and they are NEVER relevant to a rape case. If the girl was drunk that CONFIRMS guilt on the accused's part (so if the law was followed there is no way a sane defence attorney would ever ask that question anyway - that they do, that alone proves rape culture). Even if she showed up naked that does NOT constitute consent. Those questions are the epitomy of victim blaming. Here is the only question you can ask a rape victim that is relevant to a trial: "Did you say you wanted it to happen ?" You can ask related questions to test whether the victim is lying (unlikely) but that's it. It's the only thing that has ANY legal relevance to the trial. NOTHING the victim could POSSIBLY do is relevant to the defense. Even if a girl is giving somebody a blowjob it's STILL rape to penetrate her unless she consents to being penetrated. If she says "only with a condom" and you stick it in without one - that's rape because she did NOT consent to sex without it.
>But I guess you don't want justice. At MOST 1 in 8 rapes are ever reported, and the conviction rape is unbelievably low. So it's unlikely more than one in 20 rapists ever get punished. Justice is exactly what I DO want. Rape culture is why we can't get it.
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I said it can be done with enough input data. I never said I could do it for a random person on the internet.
And for the predictions I made here, I have the input data. The likely economic differences between a car and an SDC. All I need to know to predict the behaviour of people in this regard is "hungry people look for food".
>Yeah, well, I guess she can run a family on that, ha?
Not only CAN she do so, she does, and I subsidized her children's school fees so they can be in a better school. That doesn't count as part of her income either (meaning I don't get to claim it as a business expense because I don't write it on her payslip). That's just me being a decent human being,
>How many hours a day does she do for you, 4.. a week?
I pay her a monthly salary, not an hourly one. I don't care if she works 1 hour a month - as long as things are clean, her job is done, smart bosses let people go home when they've done their job for the day. Smart bosses don't punish people for being more efficient workers - they reward them by not making them sit and try to look busy till 5.
>She takes a vacation, you pay her?
Yes, I give her a long vacation every year, and she gets full pay for the month when she does.
>She gets pregnant, you are going to hire her back after a year of somebody else working for you?
I did exactly that. When she got pregnant, I got a temp in - through an agency so she will have other work after - and when she came back after 3 months, her job was waiting for her. I could have faced jailtime had it not been because it's a crime to fire somebody over getting pregnant, it's sexist in the extreme. But it was never an issue since I would never do that anyway.
If the law requiring you to do what any decent human being would have done ANYWAY puts you out of business - that's a GOOD thing, it opens up the market for a businessman who is actually deserving of the name "human being".
Literally according to the dictionary can mean two things - the meaning you grammar nazi's always complain isn't valid, is one of the meanings. But in this case, I was actually using the first meaning, it really is the easiest thing in the world to predict. It takes rather more effort when tossing a ball into the air to predict where it will land. In both cases it's easy enough that those who learn how can do it without even being aware that they are doing it, completely subconsciously, but the math that's being subconsciously done for the ball is far more complicated.
You don't need probability to predict human behaviour. Basic biology will suffice.
>Until you hired a person and paid them a salary allowing them to actually fucking live, go fuck yourself, you moralizing asswipe!
I do - and I pay fair wages. My cleaning lady earns roughly 6 times the minimum wage. I practise what I preach.
By your own admission, you think people who are not in a strong negotiating position don't deserve to be able to take a little break at least once a year, if they get pregnant they don't deserve to know they will have a job to come back to in order to feed their child.
Hell even the bloody people who CONCEIVED of the ideas you push knew that was both idiotic and brutal. That's why Hayek for example was a strong advocate of a universal basic income because, to quote him: unless there is a floor price on the labour market, the labour market can NEVER be a free market.
Without a floor price, without some things being non-negotiable - all labour markets can ONLY turn into slavemarkets - it is the only logical outcome. By your own admission - you actively avoid treating people fairly, you don't BUY their labour at a fair price - hell you don't even pay the legal minimum wage which is in most countries about half a fair wage for a full third of somebody's adult LIFE - and I'm prepared to bet you don't limit yourself to that third either. No way do you adamantly insist your workers keep an 8 hour day and if you really need them to work more pay them proper overtime rates commensurate with the fact that they are sacrificing things that matter infinitely more than your bottom line - like seeing their familes. No you steal their lives by exploiting their desperation and lack of options. People like you are the reason the soviet union ever existed. The blood of all of Stalin's victims are on YOUR hands - without people like you, communist revolutions would never have happened. Those who sell labour - are literally selling you the most precious thing they, or you, can ever have. Their time alive. The one thing nobody can ever get back once it's lost. You can make back lost money. You can heal broken bones. You can even heal a broken heart... but time lost, is lost forever, and we really don't get very much of it - certainly not enough to sell the little we have cheaply. And nobody would, unless the risk of selling high was having less time. Nobody would work for an unfair wage unless the alternative was starving. That's not free labour. That's slavery.
Nobody goes on a revolution against people who are not mistreating them.
People like you CAUSED all that bloodshed, created the only kind of conditions where people would read Marx's reasoning and then IGNORE his please to use only democratic means to change things - and choose bloody revolution instead, installing dictators as revolutions usually do.
Worker's rights exist, to keep people like you from creating the kind of conditions that inevitably boil over into revolutions like that. They exist to keep you in your selfish, arrogant, rentseeking, expoitation from causing enough misery that people become ready to sacrifice their lives - if they can just kill you. Because THAT is what your reasoning ALWAYS ends up leading to. Sooner or later.
When you coerce people into horrible working conditions which they have no choice but to reject unless they want to starve too much... sooner or later, they turn on you and they tend to go overboard.
Napoleon said "Religion is the only reason the poor don't kill the rich". What happened in the Russian revolution - that's what happens when the poor are finally pushed far enough to lose their religion, or just plain start ignoring it.
Now as it happens, and to get back on topic, the specific labour laws being discussed are ones which - when absent, harm women far more than men. No man has ever been fired because he happened to get pregnant and his boss refused to give him maternity leave - men don't get pregnant. Paid family leave when missing harms men, but it harms women far more because our society still expects them to be primary caregivers. Sweatshop labour and paying less than what's needed to escape poverty punishes not only the workers - but their children. Study after study shows how poverty in childhood causes lifelong health issues and genetic changes which harms many generations - yet you claim
Wow. What a massively long winded rant ? You could have just said "I am a rentseeking, freeloading dickhead who deserves to die a brutal death"
Indeed it does and I cited them all elsewhere on this page as well as provided a link to the wikipidia entry on it.
You're right about that, and I don't dissagree. But to claim a law doesn't exist because it should never have been passed is still disingenuous. You can't fix problems if you don't acknowledge them first.
>Maternity leave is a form of payment,
That's not what is meant by these leave things. Of course it means gettiing paid less, and unused leave is paid back to you when you resign, this is not even remotely related to where the issue is. The issue is about having it written into law that no employer can DENY this leave. You should not have to face the risk of being fired for getting pregnant.
And making it legally guaranteed that EVERY worker in the country gets at least 14 days of paid leave a year which companies are not allowed to withhold (and can be fined if an excessive amount is not taken to prevent coercion) increases the productivity of the entire workforce by several times more than what is lost to the holidays (because non-burned out people work harder).
This has been a standard labour law in every free nation except yours for nearly a century, if it was going to cause a collapse it would have done so by now. It hasn't, it made all those countries a lot RICHER than they would otherwise have been - because fuckall any libertarian or Austrian economist says has ever been remotely connected to reality.
And there is no theft involved, the branding of maintaining society as "theft" is a lie only your fellow idiots believe, smart people can figure out that all the advantages of living in civilized society cost money, and that paying your fair share is the only way you have any right to those advantages and that the wealthier you are the greater the degree to which you take advantage of them, thus the greater the burden of upkeep on you becomes.
We know that it is simply a FACT that NEVER in all of history has a moderate increase in minimum wage led to joblosses - the general effect on employment is always nett-zero with rare occasions where it causes a slight INCREASE. Empirical facts is what you people lack and what makes all your ideas nothing but cultistic pseudoscience.
>You think human behavior
There is literally nothing in the world more easily predicted. Indeed, there are a huge number of careers (most of them in fact) that depend entirely on the fact that the fact that this is so easy to predict. At the most obvious level everybody from stage magicians to conmen make their living this way, but so do all marketers, salesmen and basically every business in the world. The only difference is one of skill, predicting it in aggregate is much easier - so everybody does that (and most people do it well enough to survive), predicting a particular individual is harder but equally possible, so only a select few people can manage that. That's why there are fewer conmen and stage magicians than there are advertising agents. But they all do the same job - accurately predict people's responses to a given set of circumstances and incentives and then exploit that predictability.
We all believe that our own behavior cannot possibly be predictable, it's an illusion. In fact, even your claim that it is "stupid" to think this is a predictable thing was entirely predictable - when I wrote it I knew what your reply would be, and started preparing this response.
People respond to incentives. If you create incentives that reward cheating, almost everybody cheats. When a new technology offers massive cost advantages over the existing, almost everybody switches. You don't need to predict the few outliers to succeed because there is never enough of them to be statistically significant - and even they are entirely predictable if you have personal data on them - that's the level where the conmen operate, they study the individual, learn all about you (from very little data) and suddenly people are impressed by the psychic's apparent ability to know the unknowable. Look up "cold reading" and "leading questions" - learn how easy it is to find out all the key indicators that will predict EXACTLY what incentives would sway your behavior, exactly what wording will fool you and win your trust, exactly what your biasses are and how to exploit them.
If this was hard, or impossible, conmen would not exist at all. Contrary to popular opinion, conmen rarely pray on the stupid - the stupid doesn't have money. Conmen PREFER smart people because smart people have more to take and they are no harder to con - you just have to find the right levers, in many ways they are actually the EASIEST to con - because they assume they are too smart to BE conned.
Every other country on earth has figured out you are wrong about every one of these things, and they are all getting the benefits.
Sorry pal but your ideology is never going to be perceived as anything but an assault on half the population's ability to pursue happiness and equal opportunity and for the oddest reason, this is going to shock you, you'll never have guessed why: because that's exactly what it ends up being. It doesn't MATTER if that's the INTENTION, the RESULT matters.
Tell that to congress. They passed one.
I got 50 bucks on Fox.
>That's because they like things that trickle down.
It's sort of the perfect metaphor, because from one angle you watch it trickling down and from the other end you watch it disapear.
Like taking over a wildlife reserve warden's station ?
Scary, but mitigated by the fact that although they may remember to bring guns they apparently aren't smart enough to pack things like food and blankets...
Yes. The American system is such that a congress full of crazy wingnuts can make any president ineffectual. Obama's problem was trying to be reasonable in a room filled with 400 toddlers throwing tantrums.
Saying it does not make it so.
Somebody should point out that on every metric, from structure to final product the truth is that heavy metal is the most like classical music today. It would not be a stretch to call the best metal bands of today (notably the Slavic and German powermetal movements) the contemporary form of symphonic music, with heavy inspiration (and usage) of opera and operatic concepts (indeed, most European metal singers have classical opera training).
My all time favourite symphonic pieces is the 1812 overture and the 9th, and if you can't their echoes in the works of Powerwolf then you don't know how to listen for it.
>Although I haven't heard their arguments, what evidence the right put up in defense, statistics, studies etc.
They can't provide evidence because all the statistics are against them. Economics show that mass immigration has always, in all countries, created more jobs than the immigrants took and there is solid mathematical reasons why this is the only possible outcome so the "taking our jobs" claim has to be false because it's about as impossible as claiming you just threw a baseball into orbit. Of course economics is buffeted by many forces, and it's possible the US would be an exception at this time - but that is a seriously extraordinary claim, which requires seriously extraordinary evidence (like claiming that a variety of human may have evolved with the upper arm strength to throw a baseball into orbit without it catching fire on the way). Hell they constantly complain about a "growing number of immigrants" and even that claim is factually false since immigration rates with Mexico has been a nett negative for many years. More people are leaving the US to go TO Mexico than the other way around (mostly people who are of Mexican descent but that doesn't change the maths).
It's actually quite ironic, if Trump does build his wall, it would actually increase the number of Mexicans in America next year - because it would limit the emigration to those who have the papers to leave the country legally (hint: none of those who came in illegally have them).
> They've been all over the North Carolina "bathroom bill" and how awful and discriminatory it is despite it applying to everyone equally.
A law or rule which has the practical effect of significantly affecting one group more than others is discriminatory regardless of whether that group is named in the law or group. This is not even just an American thing, it's the legal standard all over the world. Here in South Africa it is even written into the constitution.
So for example if you live in a city with a particularly strong racial correlation to economic class, and your restaurant goes and puts up a dress code which would require clothes that almost no non-white person could afford, that would be considered de facto racial discrimination and be illegal.
Not having the law says that would mean all discrimination would have continued utterly unabated - people would simply find proxies for race that work equally well.
The bathroom bill is probably the single most egregiously discriminatory law passed since the civil rights act. North Carolina is on the wrong side of history (somehow the hard reds always seem to find themselves there) and I would just say that our grandchildren will look at this law the way we look at Jim Crow - and I for one would prefer my grandchildren to say "At least my granddad was on the side that was against these terrible laws". My own grandfather was a member of a miltant Nazi-propaganda group at that time, in that place, this was seen as nobel - but that doesn't make it any less despicable. Do you think Sam Rockwel's grandchildren are going around bragging that their grandpappy founded the American NAZI party ?
But sure, go support our generation's Jim Crow. Start a lynch mob while your at it, you won't be hated any less by future generations for NOT starting a lynch mob, they will probably assume you were in one regardless.
Well, outside the US and Canada these FM receivers work. All of my phones have had working FM receivers... and I have never used any of them, for all the radio annoyances you mention. The closest would be on the day the phone is received, checking out the features - I may put the FM on for a few seconds to hear it working, then I switch it off and it's never turned on again.
My current phone has 64Gb of storage space, that holds more than enough music on the phone itself to get through my commute and not hear the same song more than once every 2 weeks or so. No need for either data plan or the annoyances of FM radio.
>Sadly, Obama has done lots of things.
He has signed fewer executive orders than any other president in history. He has been able to pass exactly ONE of the laws he campaigned on - i.e. the laws voters elected him to get passed.
> And I, for one, am grateful for an "obstructionist" Congress in his case.
I did say we would probably not agree. I assume you are at least even handed and hate republican presidents more because pretty much everything he DID do they did first and bigger. I see a lot of people here complaining about Obama "not enforcing immigration law", but nobody seems to blame Reagan for that, even though the actions for which Obama was blamed were instituted by Reagan and the policy has simply been continued by every president since then (including both Bush presidencies). Obama did nothing new there, it's been the official policy since Reagan, Obama merely thought that a republican had been right about something - apparently republicans hate it when you think they did something right.
>Are you stating that it is illegal to start a party which supports nationalizing all companies and major private assets without compensating the current owners, or that it is illegal to start a party advocating seizing all governments from the Federal to the local school authority boards by force to do the same?
I am saying there is a law that says you cannot start or be a member of a communist party. You gave two examples of what a Bolshevist party would do, apparently you don't know that there are hundreds of varieties of communism and literally EVERY other variety rejects that approach and most of them would make the government far smaller than even the wettest republican dream (quite a lot of them are forms of anarchism). Now whether the law in question defines communism, whether it defines it as Bolshevism or whether it blanket-covers all of them I do not know, nor do I care much.
>Obviously, it is illegal to start a "Communist Party of the United States of America" for the same reason that it is illegal to start a "Walt Disney Corporation" -- violation of trademarks held by the incumbents -- but I assume THAT is not your problem.
>Obviously, it is illegal to start a "Communist Party of the United States of America" for the same reason that it is illegal to start a "Walt Disney Corporation" -- violation of trademarks held by the incumbents -- but I assume THAT is not your problem.
Did I say I have a problem ? I have no problem. I don't even live in America so I really don't care what laws you make for yourself. I just think you should know what laws you live under and not go bragging about your superiorty to the world when there are laws on the books which contradict your claims. The communist control act was passed, it was signed into law by the president, it has never been repealed and it has never been federally overturned. It is, still, the law of the land in the USA.
>PS: If "I don't read or reply to ACs. Ever."
Because the sig-length limit left me unable to add "when they reply to me" - which is true. I never know about AC replies to me because I have a mailfilter that deletes them so I never get the notifications because I do not care to read them.
>The only rape culture in the US is in the prison system
Guess you don't read much do you ?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/11...
Those are just the top-two links on a simple google search. Rape culture is the way society constantly tries to excuse rapists.
>It's good that you support ending this atrocity,
Oh, you do have sane thoughts sometimes.
>but I'm confused that you've mentioned it when describing 'the war on women'.
What men experience in prison - is the entire WORLD if your'e a woman.
>Asking a rape victim (or claimed rape victim) challenging questions is not victim blaming
"Were you drinking ?"
"What were you wearing ?"
And similar are not challenging questions and they are NEVER relevant to a rape case. If the girl was drunk that CONFIRMS guilt on the accused's part (so if the law was followed there is no way a sane defence attorney would ever ask that question anyway - that they do, that alone proves rape culture). Even if she showed up naked that does NOT constitute consent. Those questions are the epitomy of victim blaming.
Here is the only question you can ask a rape victim that is relevant to a trial: "Did you say you wanted it to happen ?" You can ask related questions to test whether the victim is lying (unlikely) but that's it. It's the only thing that has ANY legal relevance to the trial. NOTHING the victim could POSSIBLY do is relevant to the defense. Even if a girl is giving somebody a blowjob it's STILL rape to penetrate her unless she consents to being penetrated. If she says "only with a condom" and you stick it in without one - that's rape because she did NOT consent to sex without it.
>But I guess you don't want justice.
At MOST 1 in 8 rapes are ever reported, and the conviction rape is unbelievably low. So it's unlikely more than one in 20 rapists ever get punished. Justice is exactly what I DO want. Rape culture is why we can't get it.
Had I noticed I wouldn't have.